'COME forth!' my catbird calls to me,

'And hear me sing a cavatina

1 I have not felt in the mood to do much during my imprisonment. One little poem I have written, The Nightingale in the Study.' 'Tis a dialogue between my catbird and me-he calling me out of doors, I giv ing my better reasons for staying within. Of course my nightingale is Calderon. (LOWELL, in a letter to Professor C. E. Norton, July 8, 1867. Lowell's Letters, Harper and Brothers, vol. i, p. 390.)

That, in this old familiar tree, Shall hang a garden of Alcina.

'These buttercups shall brim with wine
Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic;
May not New England be divine?
My ode to ripening summer classic ?
'Or, if to me you will not hark,
By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing
Till all the alder-coverts dark
Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.

'Come out beneath the unmastered sky,
With its emancipating spaces,
And learn to sing as well as I,
Without premeditated graces.

'What boot your many-volumed gains, Those withered leaves forever turning, To win, at best, for all your pains,

IC

A nature mummy-wrapt in learning? 20

'The leaves wherein true wisdom lies

On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

"Come out!" with me the oriole cries,
Escape the demon that pursues you!
And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise,
Still hiding farther onward, wooes you.'
Alas, dear friend, that, all my days,
Hast poured from that syringa thicket
The quaintly discontinuous lays

30

To which I hold a season-ticket, 'A season-ticket cheaply bought With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul hast caught With morn and evening voluntaries, 'Deem me not faithless, if all day Among my dusty books I linger, No pipe, like thee, for June to play With fancy-led, half-conscious finger. 40

'A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances.

'I ask no ampler skies than those

His magic music rears above me,

Sometimes a breath floats by me,
An odor from Dreamland sent,
That makes the ghost seem nigh me
Of a splendor that came and went,
Of a life lived somewhere, I know not
In what diviner sphere,
Of memories that stay not and go not,
Like music beard once by an ear

That cannot forget or reclaim it,
A something so shy, it would shame it
To make it a show,

A something too vague, could I name it, For others to know,

As if I had lived it or dreamed it,

As if I had acted or schemed it,
Long ago!

And yet, could I live it over,

This life that stirs in my brain, Could I be both maiden and lover, Moon and tide, bee and clover,

As I seem to have been, once again, Could I but speak it and show it,

40

50

THE electric nerve, whose instantaneous thrill

Makes next-door gossips of the antipodes,

1 See Lowell's letters to Professor Charles Eliot Norton, February 2, and February 26, 1874, especially the second letter. Lowell was in Florence when Agassiz died. His death,' he says, came home to me in a singular way, growing into my consciousness from day to day as if it were a graft new-set, that by degrees became part of my own wood and drew a greater share of my sap than belonged to it, as grafts sometimes will.' (Lorell's Letters, Harper and Brothers, vol. ii, pp. 115116.) See also the references in note on p. 211.